Saturday, July 16, 2016

The Power of Art

This past week has been so
terrible that sometimes I wonder whether thinking about what books to read or
write or talking about how to become a better artist is shallow and pointless
and meaningless.

I studied law and public policy
at university, and I care deeply about these topics. But at the same time I
find them depressing and disheartening. Not that I have run away from such
topics, or don’t read about them anymore - in fact the book I am revising right
now is about the ban on cluster munitions, and full of depressing statistics
about victims and landmines and the death of innocent people going about their
everyday life. I am writing this book in the hope that I can spread even a
small amount of awareness about the landmark ban on these weapons, and encourage
countries who haven’t signed it to adopt the convention.

However, I am under no
illusions that this is a niche topic. Not too many people are interested in
cluster munitions. I know thats obvious, but it only became crystal clear to me
when I told people what I was working on and noted their reaction - eyes
glazed, polite smile, and crab-like scuttle towards the nearest exit. This
isn’t the most scintillating topic to most people.

Not the case about the events
of this week and generally the last few months. Most people have an opinion
about gun control (or the lack thereof) and terrorism. Most people have the
same opinions as me actually, in that most people don’t approve of the murder
of innocent people, no matter who they are. Which means that they would be
interested in cluster munitions too - if they knew that in many countries, for
instance during the Vietnam War, 30% or almost one-third of the millions of
these bombs that were dropped into the Mekong region, didn’t detonate on
impact, instead remaining for decades just waiting for an unsuspecting child or
villager to come across, and get injured or killed.

Don’t worry, this entire post
isn’t about cluster munitions. In fact, I hadn’t planned to mention them at
all, but then I realized it was a perfect metaphor for what I really wanted to
talk about.

The importance of story.

The power of art.

As I said, I worried that maybe
I care too much about superficial things, like how many people read my books,
and how many words I have managed to write. When far worse things are happening
around the world. And then I realized - that the way people are wired, it is
hard for us to care about all the terrible things that are happening all at
once. Or to understand the impact of every bad thing that happens - every time
a bomb goes off killing 100s in (fill in the blank here) or gunfire is directed
at (kids, people on the street, in a cafe, in a theater). Or to comprehend what
we need to do to stop these terrible things from happening. People complain
that the Western media is selective - the deaths of two Europeans or five
Americans are highlighted, but the hundreds of thousands of Africans that die
of disease or poverty, or the Asian children that suffer from child labor and
sweatshops and myriad other problems go unnoticed. While that may be slightly
true, I think there is room enough for us to care about all the people who
suffer - regardless of where they come from.

But the reality is that we
don’t. Some tragedies get more press and eyeballs and attention than others.
And that matters because that determines where the attention for solutions go
to as well. And this is even more stark for me, as I work on this book, because
one of the reasons that the issue of cluster munitions, and landmines before
it, got enough attention for the weapons to be banned, was that articles were
written about them in the media, and powerful politicians and influential civil
society organizations banded together to create change.

And it all started with
something simple.

They started with a story.

And this is the point of this
post. What can we as writers and authors and artists of all stripes do in the
face of such horror and tragedy? We can create art. We can create stories.

They are powerful enough to
heal when we are hurting. We can escape into a movie or a book, and forget our
problems, forget the pain for a while. When I struggled with periods of
loneliness and depression in college, I often resorted to a frothy chic-lit
book to escape my issues for the evening - my favorite author and bar of
chocolate. While that contributed to my waistline, it also helped me get
through that period and to the other side.

So stories can make us feel
better, make us feel happier.

When we go to the museum and
see paintings full of emotion, depth, mastery of technique and color, we feel
the awe, the beauty of not just the talent of the artist, but of the human
race. We feel connected to something bigger than us, something eternal,
something primal. And that is the power of art.

But that is not all. I want to
go back to what I said in the beginning - what can we as writers or authors do?
We actually have a lot more power than we know. And as Uncle Ben said to
Spiderman - with great power comes great responsibility. As writers we have the
power to get the attention of people, to get their emotions involved in the
world that we create, to make them see something from a completely different
point of view than before.

I read somewhere that Princess
Diana’s involvement with the landmine ban campaign was the PR equivalent of a
$2million campaign. Why was that? I was quite young then and don’t remember the
campaign, but I bet it was because she helped shape a specific story - look at
these children who lost limbs, these people whose family members died because
of a landmine. Can’t we stop this? The campaign focused on the people who were
affected, telling a story that was picked up by news media all over the world,
and contributing to a landmark treaty banning anti-personnel mines.

I don’t have any ideas about
how to stop the violence. I don’t know what really goes on in the head of
someone who decides to deliberately take the life of another, especially the
life of someone they don’t know, have never met. Someone who hasn’t harmed them
in any way. But I do know that stories are powerful. We may not be running
countries and deciding public policy. But we can affect change in subtle but
powerful ways. In the stories we choose to tell. In the way we frame the
issues.

I know that if I tell someone
that I wrote a book about how a particular weapon was banned, they fall asleep
talking to me. But what if I told them instead that my book was about how
people were needlessly dying from a war that ended decades earlier?Or that it was a classic David v Goliath
story - how a small group of countries and some passionate individuals managed
to change defense policy and destroy millions of weapons that were a core part
of the arsenal of the biggest military powers in the world?

What if we changed the stories
told about climate change? About terrorism? About gun control? About racism and
sexism and all the other ways that we hate each other and distrust each other
and fail to live and work together in peace?

Like I
said, I don’t have all the answers, I don’t have any answers. But I have
confidence in the power of one of the oldest vehicles of knowledge in the
world. We already have stories about these issues - but in many cases those
stories are no longer serving our highest good. Maybe its time to write some
new ones?